See Also: Initiative, Round, Melee
Combat, close in or at range, with weapons or without is the focus of the system. Standing toe to toe with your enemy and settling it. It involves many concepts working together to determine the outcome of the characters' actions (round, initiative, skills, movement). Below we introduce some terminology and fundamental concepts to get started.
For the purpose of determining distances and positions in combat, a grid of squares 5' on a side is applied to the map. A character or creature of man size occupies 1 square. The character is assumed to be in the center of the square. Therefore two people standing in adjacent squares are 5 feet apart. That is sufficient space for another person to move between them. More than one person can occupy the same square, however for the purposes of combat, freedom of movement, determining threatened space, the 5' square is used.
The round is the framework in which characters take actions. The round is 10 seconds long and each second is resolved separately. In each second of the round each character is may take one action. A character can make a maximum of 10 actions per round. See Round for more information.
An action is a general term referring to any of the various activities in which a character may engage during a given second. Since a character may only perform one action per second, each character is limited to a maximum of 10 actions per round. There are two categories of actions: Combat and Non-combat. There are four types of Combat Actions: spell casting, melee, missile, and hand-to-hand. There are two types of Non-Combat Actions: movement and miscellaneous. The number of Combat Actions of a particular type that a character can make is determined by two factors: Basic skill level and Specific skill level. The skill level in the Basic skill is the maximum number of actions of that Type that a character can make in a round. The skill level in a Specific skill determines the maximum number of times that specific skill may be used within a round. The number of miscellaneous Non-Combat Actions that a character can make during a round are only limited by the skill level in the that particular skill. All characters can take 10 movement actions in a round. A character with no combat skill(s) can still take 1 combat action each round of any combat type except for spell casting.
For example if a character has:
Page Last Updated: 2008-04-09 07:35:36